British producer Simon Chinn, who won an Oscar for "Searching for Sugar Man",
tells Nick Allen the secret to a great documentary.

British producer Simon Chinn won a second best documentary Oscar in five years with "Searching for Sugar Man," about the American folk musician Sixto Rodriguez.

The film, directed by Sweden's Malik Bendjelloul, tells the story of how, after success in the 1970s, Rodriguez was forgotten until being tracked down decades later by fans from South Africa, where his music had been hugely influential.

Chinn, who previously won an Oscar for Man on Wire in 2009, said: "Sugar Man is a film about lots of things, humility, hope. There's a great message of hope in it for anyone with a talent, if you do things wit integrity, that's what people have responded to, and also they responded to the man himself.

"The secret to a great documentary film for me is a really powerful narrative. The film has to be greater than the sum of its parts and it needs to resonate with audiences.

"Really, it's giving people what they don't expect, something that makes them laugh, cry, be inspired. It's delivering something intangible. The documentaries that work have a kind of X factor. Maybe it's the mess we're going through, the fact Rodriguez lived an incredibly rich life with nothing."

Rodriguez himself, whose revival has seen him play to 50,000 fans recently in South Africa, did not attend the Oscars, preferring instead to watch on television in Detroit.

"He's a genuinely humble individual," said Chinn. "He didn't want to take any credit for himself. He's not really someone who runs to the limelight."

Chinn, from London, started out as a runner on early nineties sitcom Sean's Show, and worked as a television producer before moving on to more ambitious cinema projects.

The first of those was Man on Wire which germinated after he heard French high-wire artist Philippe Petit talking on Desert Island Discs.

He relentlessly pursued Petit for eight months, eventually persuading the Frenchman to let him tell the story of his daredevil crossing between the Twin Towers in New York in 1974. "It was extremely fraught at times, like life and death," said Chinn of making the movie.

He believes documentaries can compete at the box office with fiction films and would like to see them nominated in the best picture Oscars category inf future.

"They can be cinematic experiences along with the best fiction," he said.

"They can deliver narrative, emotion and character. The whites of someone's eyes can tell you so much that a screenwriter can never capture in a fictional film."

His next project is The Green Prince, based on Son of Hamas, the autobiography of Mosab Hassan Yousef who worked undercover for Israel's Shin Bet.

But first, he is taking a holiday, and then working out where to put the latest golden statuette.

"When you embark on you're career you don't expect to receive an Oscar," he said. "The idea of two is a little preposterous, I hope people don't think I'm greedy. A lot of people have suggested using them as book ends."